Last year, Wu-Tang Clan's classic debut album, Enter the Wu-Tang: 36 Chambers, celebrated its 20th anniversary. As part of the celebration, the group was slated to release a new and possibly final album, A Better Tomorrow. Despite one single, "Family Reunion," making its way out, nothing came of it, and the album was pushed back indefinitely. Yesterday, a new single, "Keep Watch," appeared suddenly, prompting new excitement. And today, Grantland published a 10-part profile covering each Wu-Tang member (including Cappadonna), going inside the story of the new album, and discussing the state of the multi-faceted group as it heads into its 21st year.
The full article is worth a read for both great portraits of each member's current life and essential Wu trivia (Cappadonna, on first meeting Method Man through a friend: “He was like, ‘This my man Clifford, he just moved around here, he rocks.’ I was like, Clifford? We don’t deal with nobody with the name Clifford.”). There are stories about how the members met each other, about Inspectah Deck's legendary verse on "Triumph," about Masta Killah's original role as the group's barber/driver, and about a ton of other historical elements.
But it also has a lot of thoughts from individual members on the possibility of A Better Tomorrow, which, like most Wu-Tang projects, seems to have been mostly the RZA's passion project and something that the rest of the members went along with to varying degrees. The project was mostly recorded in Europe while the group was on tour there last year, but Ghostface Killah and Raekwon were apparently minimally involved, and, according to Inspectah Deck, the chemistry of the classic sessions wasn't quite there:
Raekwon, historically the most at odds with RZA publicly, sounded off on the effort a little more critically:
He did, however, note that he was sympathetic to the challenges of corralling the whole group. And he later added that his hesitation was based above all on a belief in the group:
GZA seemed a little ambivalent about the whole thing:
Masta Killah is hoping the group doesn't embarrass itself too much with in-fighting:
And RZA is still trying his hardest to keep the group's magic alive:
Meanwhile, Cappadonna just dropped a ton of gems, explaining, among other things, that he may have telekinetic powers: “One time I sat there and I convinced myself that I’m gonna make this door close. All I concentrated on was making that door close. Guess what? The door closed.”
Find out more about the legendary crew by checking out the full profile here.
[via Grantland]
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